Contractor Marketing Question Of The Week – Reviews & SEO

Do Reviews Help SEO?

This week we have a common question that we get from many of our customers. Learning why and how reviews can help your SEO is one of the reasons why we talk about reviews so much here at 33 Mile Radius.

Learn more in our short video:

Reviews are a cheap and effective way to help boost your SEO rankings. If you do not have a strategy in place already then you need to start asking for reviews from each and everyone of your customers.

If you are looking to get more reviews or just improve online reviews that you already have then take a look at Acquirly today.

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the second Contractor Marketing Question of the Week. I have Andrew here who is our Director of SEO, SEO expert. Is that good?

Yeah.

Okay. All right, cool. Our question this week, and this is one that we get a lot, is how do reviews affect your SEO?

Yeah, and that’s a fantastic question. Notice that the question wasn’t do reviews, positive reviews, affect your SEO because that answer is very easy and it’s a yes. We want to take a deeper dive into how this affects your SEO. There are three main points that I want to talk about. The first of which is Google has come out and said that positive reviews do affect your SEO and in fact they say, I’m reading here directly from them, this piece of paper directly from them. It says, “High quality positive reviews from your customers will improve your business’s visibility.”

That’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to Google coming out and saying that one thing in specifically helps your reviews. In this case, or helps your listing gain visibility. In this case they’re saying positive reviews do help. Absolutely getting more positive reviews is going to help increase your visibility, therefore your SEO in general.

Seems pretty clear to me. That’s Google saying that, correct?

Yeah, right.

What’s the next one?

The second one is a little bit more complex. This goes into a lot of SEO theory, but it has been proven. That is when you get more reviews on your listing on Google people are more likely to click on it. That’s because, and we know this through stats, 90% of consumers use reviews to learn if a business is right for them or not. That’s a high number first of all and you should always give reviews just because of that number, but because getting more reviews is going to increase the amount of people that click on your listing, just by having the people click on your listing, more people click on your listing is going to improve that listing’s performance and therefore its ranking on Google.

That’s simply because Google thinks that, and rightfully so, that when more people click on your listing that you’re listing is more popular and that it deserves to be ranked higher. The second point, it’s a little bit more complex. There’s a lot more that goes into this theory of clicks and everything, but more clicks raises your listing’s visibility.

More clicks probably means more jobs too.

Yeah, absolutely.

Two for one. What’s the last one?

The last one is outside of Google. This is an impact on your listing as well. That’s what Google gets as signals from other websites. Signals composes everything, all the positive reviews, all the content and everything like that that is outside of the Google realm. Getting positive reviews, and notice that we say positive. Negative reviews add the opposite effect. Getting positive reviews on websites like Yelp or Home Advisor or YP.com or some of these other places will help your Google listing as well.

You don’t want all your reviews in one spot. That’s not what Google wants to see, although Google would really like you to put them all on Google, but it’s not well rounded and it looks odd. Having them spread out really helps your listing. That’s the third and last thing is getting not only reviews on Google, but reviews elsewhere sends signals to Google that says that your business is more legitimate and therefore ranks higher on Google.

Wow, so the strategy should be not just Google, not just Facebook or Yelp or wherever else. It should be kind of all over.

Yeah. Absolutely. That’s what I love about our app is it gives the option to go to many other places rather than just the one. A lot of people, al to of business owners through my experience anyway, they choose one and it’s usually Google or one that they care about. That’s not what you want. You want a more natural approach.

Cool. Well, thanks for this shameless plug there.

Yeah. Yeah, sorry about that.

We’ll end it there and if you guys have a question just send it our way at Marketing@33MileRadius.com. We’ll get it answered for you. Thank you.